Did you pull that list of errors out of the system log, or was that shown on the screen? When I look at the source code for Felix, it looks to me as if the exact directory it cannot create would be in the system log. Look in the Utilities subdirectory of the Applications directory, and start up the Console application you find there. I do not know, though, which log you need to look in. Click in the upper left on "Show Log List" and use the list that appears on the left; for example it might be the Java log that is relevant, or perhaps under "/var/logs" you might find something relevant.
It appears that you might have a permission problem. The official bug report ishere and there is someone reporting it as a permissions problemover here
The later also indicates that it could be a problem with the Java versions, so you might have to reinstall Java
Possibly if you start up MATLAB as root / administrator then that might fix the problem.
Are you logged in as root when you run MATLAB? If not, then you could _try_
sudo matlab
and see if that helped.
It should be possible to trace which directory the problem is with by using strace .
I see that there was a 10.6.7 security update not long ago. Is it possible that you have your system set to automatically install updates and it did that recently? It would have rebooted if it had done that.
If I read the source correctly, by default it would try to create a directory named felix-cache under the current directory. But that's the default for the Felix code, and I do not know what MATLAB might be setting as the default.
If you start up the system console, then it appears that the exact directory name involved should have been logged in one of the logs; I'm not sure which one.
"sudo" is an OS-X command that would be entered in to a Terminal window. The Terminal app should be in the Utilities subdirectory of the Applications directory. You would open a terminal window and type
sudo matlab
there. You would be prompted for the name and password of an administrator (e.g., your own username and password.) It would then start matlab as a privileged user, hopefully allowing the problem to be bypassed.
Sorry, I missed your question "is logging in as root different logging in as normal". The answer is Yes, and that you would not normally be able to log in directly as root (but it is possible to configure the system to allow it.) Anyhow, if the question doesn't mean anything to you, then you very likely are _not_ logging in as root.
Hmmm.... You might have to look under /Applications/MATLAB_R2010aSV.app to find the proper start-up script. It might be a shell script named "matlab" in a "bin" subdirectory of that directory.
Sorry, I have OS-X 10.6.6 (Leopard) on my laptop here, but Matlab is instead installed on the Linux machines at work, so I do not know the precise directory structure used by Matlab on OS-X.
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